AboutBlogging.Info - Making Money Online

This has been a good start to my week blogging. All of a sudden I have now got three blogs which have achieved PageRank. This blog is now PageRank 2, as is my personal blog, while my bonsai blog is PageRank 1.

This is a good step forward for me and once again, as with my Alexa rank last week, all of the movement is in the right direction.

I also have more good news with my Alexa rankings. This blog has gone under a million for the first time and now stands at 969,979. The bonsai blog is at 1,368,894. My personal blog is hosted on another server and so I can’t take all the credit for the ranking it gets as a result.

Meanwhile my new Blogumnist blog, about how I quit my day job to blog is a new entrant to Alexa. It started off last week at 8,000,000 and now stands at 2,621,242.

While I’m still not making enough money from blogging to live on I take it as a good sign that after one week of being a full-time blogger (in theory at least) and just a little over a month of being any way serious about it I’ve at least made some progress with Alexa and PageRank.

The single most important thing I have done so far to achieve this has been to go out and visit other blogs and commented. I feel this to be the best way to build your online presence to begin with.

Since my post about installing the Alexa toolbar to improve your ranking a month ago, mine has gone from no rank to 1,161,153.

When I initially installed the toolbar into my browser and placed the Alexa widget on my site it took two days for me to register a ranking of 6,073,354. Within two weeks that went to 3,000,000 and then this week it went to 1,161,153. I have read of other bloggers making quicker progress than that but nevertheless it is steady.

My bonsai blog took a different course. Initially it took over a week to register any ranking - 10,000,000 - and it stayed at that ranking continuously until last week when it zoomed up to 1,513,426. I found this interesting because I usually have about twice the number of visitors to that site that I do to this one, but despite that the ranking was in the tens of millions until last week.

I initially thought the difference was because I had the widget installed on this blog but not on the gardening one but that doesn’t seem to have been the case because I have since put the widget on it too and yet the ranking still remained in the tens of millions for a couple of weeks.

I’m glad to see my Alexa rankings climb out of the high millions into the low millions. Despite however inaccurate the ranking may be it does at least give some indication of a sites popularity and to have it going down rather than up is surely a good thing

I still haven’t achieved a Google PageRank on any of my sites. Now that Alexa is starting to look a bit more respectable for me I must have a great look at PageRank.

If you use Firefox or Mozilla as your browser an interesting extension you can install is SearchStatus which shows you the Google PageRank and also the Alexa Rank of whatever site you are visiting. The statistics from SearchStatus are also used to record data for Alexa so they count towards your ranking.

Among the other interesting features of SearchStatus is that it can highlight all the nofollow links on a web-site. This is useful because I have come across some sites where they claim to follow your links but actually don’t.

It’s a simple idea. I read it on BlogsForMoney.Com and I’m just passing it on. If you’re like me then you’re probably your own best customer: You visit your web-site more often than anyone else, checking comments, for maintenance purposes or just for the sake of naval-gazing.

The accuracy of Alexa rankings are disputed. Whether or not they give a truly accurate representation of the popularity of your web-site, a good Alexa rating is more than helpful if you want your site to be recognized as having ‘made it’. This increases the property value of your site and makes potential advertisers more interested in you.

Alexa ranks your site by the number of times that it is visited by people with the Alexa toolbar installed. So install the toolbar! Every little helps! When you visit your own site you help to improve your score. Also encourage your friends and visitors to your site to download the toolbar, just like I’m doing now!

(Edit: September 26. It’s early days yet but since I downloaded the toolbar two days ago I now have a ranking on Alexa. Admittedly not a good one (6,073,354) but at least I’m registering a score now whereas before I just didn’t exist. In addition to downloading the toolbar I also installed an Alexa widget on this blog. This seems to have made the difference to my ranking since I have used my browser with the toolbar to visit my gardening and personal blog the same amount of times that I visited this one but so far this is the only one that has achieved a ranking. Each time the widget is downloaded Alexa registers a hit so that seems to be the biggest